The hidden costs of tall border fences

There are hidden costs to those towering walls that some in Congress still think are insufficient to secure the southern border.

The costs are paid by you and by people that Dr. Lynn Gries says are “depersonalized and seen as some sort of enemy.” She’s a trauma surgeon at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson.

And yes, she’s talking about people who get hurt trying to cross the border illegally.

The most seriously injured are brought to UAMC, a Level 1 trauma center.

Gries says, “It’s awful to watch.” But she also says you need to look a little closer at the unintended consequences of border policies.

“We can’t make good decisions unless we are aware of this,” she says.

UAMC takes care of about 170 border crossers a year who are too ill or severely injured to be handled at local hospitals. These include people found near death in the desert and those who were packed into unsafe vehicles that crashed.

But the fence is the untold story.

“The wall is a constant source of injuries,” says Dr. John Ruth, head of orthopedic surgery at UAMC.

The border fence between the twin cities of Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Sonora, ranges from 18 to 30 feet high. People still try to get over it.

Gries says the peak year for injuries related to the wall was 2010, when 60 people were brought to the hospital with shattered bones, spinal injuries and bodies “crumpled like a beer can.” Since 2007, the number consistently has been in the range of 30 to 50 people a year.

“We see this on a weekly basis,” Ruth says.

They see people who went back to Mexico to help a sick relative and were desperate to get home to spouses and children in the United States. Middle-age women. Manual laborers whose only real asset is a strong body that they hope to put to hard work in the land of plenty. People from China, Central America, India, Romania — people who passed the point of no return a thousand miles before they got to the wall.

Some fell from ropes or ladders that proved too short. Some were pushed over by smugglers when they got to the top of the wall and balked, Ruth says.

Gries says the injured can be separated into the lucky ones — whose bones compress — and the unlucky ones — whose bones shatter and send splinters in all directions, including into the spinal cord. Some lose feet or legs to amputation. Others are permanently crippled.

About six people a year wind up paralyzed. Once stabilized and returned to what may be a rural home in Mexico, they will be well cared for by family, Ruth says. But it’s “almost a death sentence.” Rural villages lack the medical support to deal with such profound disabilities.

I told these doctors that some people will say: “So what?” Some people tell me that those who cross the border illegally deserve no sympathy, even if they die.

Ruth said hospitals have both a legal and moral responsibility to care for the injured. The charges — some compensated and some not — have increased five- or sixfold since 2003, according to figures Gries has been compiling. That’s your hidden cost.

“We have to figure out a way to prevent this,” Ruth said.

Illegal immigration is down. But only one-third of the recent drop in numbers is the result of enforcement, according to a report released this month by the Council on Foreign Relations. It was the recession that caused most of the slowdown.

Despite the still-sluggish economy — and despite the fence — people still come. Think about what it would take to make you try to drop from a 30-foot wall. That’s a good place to start a discussion that should be about decent human motivations, not law enforcement.

The doctors I met with at UAMC didn’t take sides in the political debate over immigration reform. But they deal with the real suffering that results from political decisions, and they want you to know what’s happening.

Gries says: “We have to take some ownership of what our policies are causing.”

Reach Valdez at linda.valdez@arizonarepublic .com. Read her blog at valdez.azcentral.com or follow her on Twitter @valdezlinda.

Join thousands of azcentral.com fans on Facebook and get the day's most popular and talked-about Valley news, sports, entertainment and more - right in your newsfeed. You'll see what others are saying about the hot topics of the day.